What I wanted to do was not to study your personal studies.
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“Coming to you direct from our Super Secret Studio”
in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C.
And from other, undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, welcome to DSR's Words Matter. I'm David Rothkuff. Your host, joined this week as every week by my partner in crime here, in Norm, or in Steenary, doing Norm.
About as well as could be expected, David, which is my answer every time we meet. Every single week for about 25 years now. And we are joined also by our friend. One of the people we really admire most in the United States Congress representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat and the House Armed Services Committee.
And frankly, if I may offer a personal opinion, one of the smartest and most thoughtful members of Congress I've ever met. Welcome, Adam. Thank you. Thank you.
Have me on this very kind of you to say, David, I appreciate that.
And always enjoy our conversations.
Always learn a lot from them as well. So thank you. Well, it's a two-way street.
“And I'm going to start with a hard question and then Norm can ask you easier questions.”
What's going on? Adam? Yeah. All right. Here's what's going on.
I mean, you got the whole two big things. One, Trump is not as easily being able to achieve his aims in Iran as he had hoped. And he's shown figure out what to do about that. And that has all kinds of danger in it.
Here in Congress, we have this battle of the funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
The Department of Homeland Security has about a $65 billion budget.
It takes in a lot of different things. But it funds immigration enforcement through ice and through the board of Earth. We Democrats have a major problem with the way Trump is doing immigration enforcement. And we want that reformed. But we Democrats also want to make sure that as we sort out this disagreement,
“we want to minimize the damage to the American people.”
So basically, we want to fund the other parts of the Department of Homeland Security. That's TSA, most famously, as we've seen all the lines of the airport. But Coast Guard V-mines have a lot of other things. So we have long proposed set aside ice and border patrol and fund everything else. Well, John Thun finally agreed at two 30 in the morning last night.
And the Senate unanimously passed that bill to fund everything. And DHS, except for the ice and border patrol portions of it. So we passed that. And now Mike Johnson has decided he doesn't want to pass that. He apparently wants the chaos in the airports to continue.
So he has decided to try to come up with another plan. Right now they're talking about doing a 60 day CR for all of DHS. Which basically, here's a bipartisan agreement on the table to solve the airport problem. He won't take it and steady wants to continue to engage in the partisan fight. Now that's going to come out.
I don't know. They're talking in conference. If they do this, if they vote on something that is purely partisan has already been rejected, then go home for two weeks with our airports and chaos. I mean, not that. I mean, this this Congress does not surprise me.
Donald Trump does not surprise me. But it that is shocking and unsurprising all at the same time, given the way Trump and Mike Johnson have been running this place for the last 14 months. Okay, no, I want to turn it over to Norm. And I do think we want to focus a little more on the the warning run.
But let me ask you a follow up question on the TSA matter. Yesterday, the president said that he could buy executive order pay everybody at TSA, which I was a little surprised by him was wondering what your reaction was. Well, not legally, he can't. The appropriations process works the way the appropriations process works,
which means Congress, our to hold, we have to approve it. But he's done this over and over again in the last 14 months. Now, he's been routinely sued. He has routinely had that spending walked or sorry, his decisions on that spending walk.
So, yeah, no, he can't legally do that.
And he can't really effectively do that either.
“And that our TSA agents going to trust that, are they going to believe that?”
So, no, and again, I really want to emphasize we have a bipartisan solution, just sitting on our desk over here in the house. All we got to do is pass it, Trump signs it, TSA is back being paid. But now, legally, he can't just use the United States Treasury as his own personal piggy bank to spend the money wherever he wants to.
That's not legal, even though he has done it repeatedly in the last 14 months. Thank you for clarifying that, Norm. So, a couple of points that follow on that. One is he is attempting this after 47 days. But of course, he could have tried to do it 47 days ago.
So, it's been pretty clear that through all of this, he's been holding TSA and all of these passengers and everybody else hostage. That's a really important point. And in the way I describe it is, look, politics, you have disagreements. You have people in different positions, you try to resolve those.
You know, you don't just give in for the sake of giving in.
But what I've always done, and most of my colleagues have always done,
is you try to have those disagreements in a way that is least harmful to the country and everybody else. Trump takes the exact opposite approach. Anytime anyone disagrees with them, he wants to maximize the pain for everybody. He wants, I mean, they're literally running ads in airports,
using our taxpayer dollars blaming the Democrats for not funding TSA. So, he's trying to seek political advantage. Instead of doing what has been on the table as you pointed out for 47 days, pay TSA. We've agreed to that a long time ago, but he wants to ramp up the pain and then hopes that he can blame Democrats
for crossing it when the solution is right there for him to implement. We should also point out that those ads are utterly illegal. Yes. Oh, totally. Violations of the Hatch Act. But they get away with all this stuff.
And that leads me to a follow-up question. And then I've got some other areas to explore. And as David said, we want to turn to the war a little bit. And that is we have a Congress with a majority that's completely abdicated every one of its responsibilities.
When they hear him say, I'm going to pay them unilaterally. Instead of saying, no, that's Congress's job. We appropriate, not you. They say nothing. And they said nothing about the war. What I want to ask you,
representative Smith, is as you talk privately to your Republican colleagues. Are they upset at all about this? Are they going along because they're along with those who are true believers and fully in the cult? Are the others just afraid to speak up?
Or are they just all going along with this?
Well, first of all, back to your earlier comment.
One of the Trump is completely getting away with it. As we've pointed out, he has lost every single special election. The American public are saying, we don't like what you're doing. We'll see what happens in the midterm. So right now, his party is on-paced to experience historic defeats
because the people don't like it. Now, that's unsatisfying to me as it is to most people.
“I think he should be removed from office for blatantly ignoring the constitution.”
But to your second point, Republicans won't do that. I mean, there's all kinds of layers to the way the Republican party has a loud, Donald Trump to turn them into a Donald Trump cult. They are no longer a party of ideas. Whatever Trump says they do.
I mean, and I think about it is, if he says one thing in the morning, and then he says the exact opposite of a couple hours later, they think he's right both times. That's just the way they've chosen to do this. And the biggest reason is, is yes, they're afraid of him.
He has been able to control the Republican party to the point where if Trump goes after you in a primary 99 times out of 100, you lose. So they are afraid to cross him, and they will contortion themselves, and the most grotesque ways possible to justify doing whatever Trump wants, not to mention all the psychophanics sucking up like apparently Mike Johnson
gave him some award yesterday. The American First Award that he can put up there next to his FIFA Peace Prize. Yeah, it has become unbelievably pathetic when you watch the way they suck up to Trump. But I've worked for a lot of different presidents. And yes, by and large, you will give greater difference to a president
of your party than you would to one of the opposite party. But every single Congress I had met in has challenged the party, even though it's sorry, the president, even though they're on party, totally some degree.
“I won't do that with Trump, but I think it's because of fear,”
and it's because they've simply decided to go along to get along. Yeah, they're concerned about a whole bunch of different aspects about it
when you talk to them and private, but they will never do anything
to directly challenge Trump.
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It can be made to a real help. Let's see if I can get a call from Shopify. I want to ask a question that maybe you haven't had, because it's pretty new before we pivot to the war directly. And that is Pete Hexith reporting this morning that number of military figures up for promotion to one star general.
And he has thrown out the promotions for four, two African Americans, two women. So I'd just like to have you reflect a little bit. This is a broader issue of the, you know, blowing up all expertise in the executive branch. But this seems to me to be a step along with some of the other moves that he has made,
demoting some officers and generals promoting others. That is deeply undermining our national security and destroying the military from within. So discuss. It definitely seems to be a pattern in a plan within the Pentagon to aid demand loyalty and be have a bias towards straight white men. I mean, that, that definitely has played out. That bias is unquestionable when you look,
I mean, CQ Brown, who is the chairman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a black man, you know, very qualified lead commands all of the plays. He got out. They've ousted a lot of people along that.
And then also when they went in and purged the library, when they first got in,
you know, along other things, they got rid of a biography of Jackie Robinson. Someone wrote a great contrast and I forget what, what defense library it was. You could walk into, you could find two copies of mine comps. But they got rid of the biography of Jackie Robinson. They also, of course, purged all of the images.
They, they removed the word gay from throughout the entire thing. But, of course, voided out all the images of the Anola gay, briefly. You know, which obviously means something different. But yeah, they are waging a right wing cultural revolution within Congress. So we're, we're sorry, within the Pentagon, which is very focused on an ideology that
comes pretty close to white Christian nationalism. You see it in a lot of the religious overtones of what they've said. And look, I come from the Seattle area, part of my district is in Seattle.
“I think the left went entirely too far with their own cultural revolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
And a number of different directions. And, you know, fixing that and getting back to a more balanced approach, I'm in favour of. It's not what Hague Seth is doing. He's going all the way over to an extreme right wing agenda that an absolute minimum is appeasing white Christian nationalism. And in some cases, it appears that it's actually leading the charge towards that approach. So it is deeply troubling and you already correctly pointed out one big problem with it.
It undermines the capability. Because if you know you're being picked based on your ideology, not based on your capability, it'd be picked based on your loyalty, not based on your talents. That undermines the effectiveness of the department. So also blind loyalty is a problem when you a president making decisions that he shouldn't be making.
And lack of capability is a problem. And here we are with the president having launched now war against Iran. We're approaching the one month mark with this war. And it's the least popular war at its inception that we've seen in the modern era from Americans. They don't want it. The president's base doesn't want it.
Yet, you know, it's a little bit like quicksand.
I think he thought he could get in and get out like he did last summer, like he did in Venezuela.
And at the same time he riggles and moves, he sinks deeper in this. And I'm just wondering from your perspective right now.
“What is your expectation about the next phases of this?”
He said, let's not attack energy sites for two more weeks. But at the same time, he's moving units that are capable of going in and doing things like Carg Island into the theater of operation, which sends mixed signals. How do you interpret the music? Two big parts to this.
One, and it's directly connected to Norm's question. Just prior to that, is because loyalty is the task, the president ignored advice. Or didn't get the advice, because people were afraid to tell him something he didn't want to hear. Because when you're talking about dealing with Iran, and Iran is without a question, without question a problem. You know, their desire apparently to build up towards a nuclear weapon is a problem.
They're ballistic missile programs, a problem they're support for terrorist proxies and their hostility in the region. It's a problem we've wrestled with, you know, certainly, you know, well, for the last 47 years, but most distinctly in the last 15, as we learned about their nuclear program, and as Hezboid Hamas grew in power and they supported them. So I've sat in briefings for 15 years at least now.
“Having this conversation, what do you do about Iran? What's the military option?”
And most of those briefings were from the standpoint of, let's find something we can do. Because this is intolerable. How do we make it stop? How do we figure out how to deal with Iran? But every single one of those briefings said there really isn't a good military option for reasons that are now becoming clear in this war. And there's sort of three parts to it. One, if your goal is to degrade Iran's capability, which, by the way, we've done a reasonably effective job of over the course of the last four months,
in terms of blowing up missiles and missile launchers and production capacity and all that, Iran's capability has been reduced. But what benefit is that? All right, Iran wasn't actually actively attacking anybody. They were just building up weapons, supporting proxy forces, sort of a low grade thing. So, have you really degraded their capability to degrade that they're going to change that behavior and be less of a problem?
I have yet to see anything from the Pentagon that shows us that. They can show you, we blew up this many missiles, we blew up this many launchers.
“But how does that fundamentally change the role that Iran plays in the Middle East?”
Second thing is, okay. If you say that, say, well, we are going to fundamentally change the Iran's role in the Middle East because we are going to break them this time, which is sort of kind of floded out there or something that Trump thinks he's going to do. And what that means is either regime change, either these guys are gone and a whole new group of Iranians are in who will change all of this, or whoever is left, they will be sufficiently beaten down that they will acquiesce to our demands.
They will abandon their nuclear program, they will abandon their ballistic missile program, they will abandon support for proxy forces. And the problem with that is, how are you going to accomplish that? What's the, what militarily you're going to do because Iran has not been as well. All right, it's not just one guy at the top and then Delcy Rodriguez waiting in the wings. This is a layered, layered, deep, deep Iranian regime that over 47 years has built up all manner of political military religious structures.
They're not dependent upon one person or even two or three dozen people. They're dug in deep and hard to dislodge.
They have, you know, a million, so militiamen, they have the IRGC.
And also they have an ideology that doesn't mind suffering or even dying. So, how are you going to break them? And the military conclusion was, you're not, which is why you shouldn't try. And then there's the third piece of this. You could say, okay, even if you don't break them, degrading them, gets you sucked.
And it does. I mean, even the war that, the 12 day war that Israel waged against Iran, you know, and we've just paid it in for a one brief raid, that weakened them. And then that did accomplish something. But the full-scale war in the Middle East, the Donald Trump launched, comes with costs.
And that was always what was discussed when we were talking about why this wasn't such a good idea.
First of all, you'll be placing US service members at risk. We have a dozen bases spread out across, I don't know, six, seven countries in the Middle East. All of them would be instantly targets. We've seen 13 service members killed as a result. We've seen over 300 wounded as a result.
You would also take a major part of the global economy and throw it into chaos. And that's oil certainly. It's also fertilizer, by the way.
People underestimate the importance of fertilizer, but that's starting to be ...
So, you have a huge increase in gas prices. You are jeopardizing a huge portion of the economy that's driving up costs everywhere. You have destabilized the entire Middle East.
“And are you really any closer to the goal of having broken Iran at this point than you were 47 days ago?”
No, you're really not. Now you have degraded them, but they're not close to breaking, which brings us to your point. What do you do now? All right. Is there a way to escalate this that will break them?
And there really, there's only two options on that front. I guess you can keep bombing, but everyone kind of agrees that that alone isn't going to do it. So then you got ground troops. What are the ground troops going to do? I mean, Iran has three times the size of Iraq.
And I forget it was somewhere around 150,000, 200,000 troops that we said in Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein. We, I don't think even if we decided, no, literally. I mean, remember, Saddam Hussein spent eight years fighting Iran. And they didn't give up then either.
So I don't even know that that's apply a viable option. Is there something short of that we could do? Could we drop some ODAs in a couple thousand ground troops somewhere and get a choke point on Iran? I don't see anything on that front.
And then the second thing is we could go scorched earth and just try to destroy their energy infrastructure,
destroy everything. One, we've said that we won't fight war that way because that is a war on the civilian population, not the military prop population. And two, it might undermine any effort to try and change the regime because now you've united the people against the common enemy that's basically trying to blow them up. But that is the choice that Donald Trump faces right now.
Except that he started a war that really didn't accomplish what he'd hoped to accomplish and end it, or doubled down under the hope that maybe something can be done that will accomplish those goals. Despite the fact that again, any intelligent person looking at that is going to conclude that it wouldn't work. Let me follow up in a couple of ways which would normally cut five minutes.
“Okay, because I think it's important to follow up here.”
We see reports this morning that Iran is exploring closing another avenue on the Red Sea by using its who-ty friends. So they have more weapons at their disposal to disrupt the international economy and the oil fertilizer and helium. But what we also know is that American aims and Israeli aims may be very different.
So my question is this, let's say that Trump basically just decides that he is going to declare victory.
Say he's worked out a deal with the Iranians pull out and hope that they will reopen the Straits of Hormuz. But BB Netanyahu and his compatriots have a different idea and continue to go after the Iranians. You see any expectation that the US and Israel will act in concert here with all these bad options. I mean, I think it's a problem. The expectation would be, hey, we're in this together, let's not screw everything up, but Israel has operated on the runs.
So yes, that's the second layer to the problem. Look at this point, there's no great option, even if Trump does, but I think he ought to do, which is tries to find a way out. The law of ramp is quickly as possible. The Red Sea and the straight of Hormuz will be under threat. And that's important, we did this three month camp in a year, almost a year ago now. And Yemen did back off at that point and stopped directly attacking shipping going through the Red Sea.
But shipping going through the Red Sea has only increased by a trickle. It's nowhere near what it used to be, which is a major problem for Egypt right now because they depend on Suez Canal revenue. But the commercial industry is like, okay, the Houthi say they're not shooting at us now.
I don't want to be the first ship when they change their mind, okay?
It's too unstable, we're not going there. I don't have a vision now for how that changes in the straight of Hormuz. Iran has made it clear that they will hold the straight of Hormuz under threat. So commercial shipping companies are going to see their costs skyrocket in terms of insurance, even if they dare to go through that region.
And yeah, if you really want to stop the war and get to some kind of agreement,
“the only way to open the straight of Hormuz backup is if Iran very clearly agrees to do it”
and people have confidence that there is a lasting peace. Israel has to be part of that conversation. The reason the Houthis started attacking the Red Sea was because of what Israel was doing in Gaza. So unless we get Israel in the US on the same page, it's going to be difficult. Let me just say, Israel is really in a dangerous place right now.
I mean, I understand the threats they face and they wonder, we can amass and Hezbollah, Assad was a problem Iran was a problem. They've really taken care of all of that. But what they're not doing is they're not building a future in Lebanon in Syria in Gaza. You can't just keep bombing.
At some point, you have to build an alternative.
There are opportunities.
I think Israel continued to fight this war as creating more enemies,
“maintaining the chaos, and it makes the off ramp more difficult without question.”
So basically, it sounds to me as we're wrapping up here like there are no good options in your returns.
And so it started this war. You know, once you started it, you know, cliché, but wars are easy to start than they are to end. There's no great right. What that means ultimately, if somebody were giving him any advice he'd listen to,
“is that it's got to take the least bad option.”
And again, David, I really want to emphasize this isn't me playing Nostradamus here.
Okay, this was laid out in epic detail across multiple administrations, dozens of senior military leadership, countless members of Congress. We've been a having this conversation for 15 years. This wasn't just predictable. It was predicted over and over and over again.
“And that's part of Trump, Trump's like he didn't care.”
He trusts his gut in his bones, basically.
And we're paying the price for that rather questionable approach to leadership. No question about it. Well, look, Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. This is super useful. We will get it out there immediately because we know our listeners want to hear this and hear it from somebody with your perspective.
Thanks for joining us. Thanks, everybody. We'll be on this each and every day going forward. I hope to see you again soon, representative Smith. And of course, use two Professor Ornstein.
You too, David Rothkov. Thank you very much. All right, everybody. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.
Thanks, David. Don't get to see him. Appreciate it to see you. Bye-bye.
